


Color Outside The Lines

by the_original_starfruit



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, I don't really know what this is, Platonic Love, Puppy Love, crushes i guess ??, eddie is just confused, kindergarten mishaps, richie is doing his best, shameless fluff, stan is a matchmaker at five years old, they're tiny kids, uuuuh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 00:31:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14484738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_original_starfruit/pseuds/the_original_starfruit
Summary: The staring boy is quiet for a second, and his eyes have gotten even bigger, shimmering behind his glasses as he looks Eddie up and down.“Hi,” Eddie says finally, reluctantly, and suddenly the boy smiles, a too-big grin that changes his face – it’s full of wild, crooked teeth and warm sunshine. His whole appearance is like a crayon drawing that won't stay in the lines.OR: the author has a whole lot of five year old cousins, teaches some five year old kids & will write fanfiction about anything





	Color Outside The Lines

**Author's Note:**

> ... so i just wanted to make it absolutely clear that i Do Not believe kids form romantic attachments to each other at this age. i think they really just express love the same way they see role models doing it, but they don't understand the differences between types of love and at five years old they're only capable of experiencing platonic love.... so yeah please don't take this as me sexualizing children cause that is literally the opposite of my intention !! this was just meant to be a little lighthearted thing !! okay thanks for listening to me rant bye  & please enjoy <3

            After climbing carefully out of his mother’s embrace, Eddie holds his own hands and stands shyly at the edge of the room.

            It’s a very large room, with rows of little desks and bins of stuff lining the walls and bright, colorful squares of carpet patchworked on the floor. There are lots of other kids, and they’re loud – they shout and jump at each other like they’re at the playground and not in a building. Eddie isn’t sure what to do with it all. He keeps looking around, wide-eyed, at the kids and the bright windows in that room and the tall lady who bids a smiling goodbye to some lingering parents and comes to stand by the big desk.

            “Alright, class!” She says, and the room quickly quiets at the authority in her voice, “Everyone choose a desk, please, and I’ll pass out paper and crayons so we can each make a name tag and learn each other’s names. My name is Miss Davis. Welcome to kindergarten.”

            Eddie blinks twice, goes slowly to sit at a desk next to a girl with wispy brown hair, and when she smiles at him he decides he might like kindergarten.

            There’s a lot to like – the waxy smell and bright colors of crayons in their chafing paper wraps, the spelling worksheets with their nice straight lines like dotted lanes in a road, and the boy named Stan who sits on Eddie’s other side (he lines his pencil up perfectly straight with the edge of his desk, and keeps his clothes very clean). But Eddie is most excited when they finish the spelling and a bell rings, long and loud, because he knows it’s time to go outside and play.

            They all get up to run to the door until Miss Davis shepherds them into a line, and they march out one by one like ducklings. Eddie wiggles excitedly because he heard someone say _playground,_ and he expects clean grass and paths like at the park, but the door opens outside to a huge square yard surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, and almost the whole ground is gritty, grubby dust. He scowls for a second at the dirtiness of it all, but then reminds himself it’s only the first day.

            _Maybe it won’t be so bad,_ he thinks, _I’ll go over and try the swings._

So he does, the sun hot on the top of his head. He kicks his feet and legs, but he doesn’t move, and the swings lose their magic without someone there to push him. He hears shouts and footsteps pounding, and he squints up at the game of tag: a lot of boys running and hitting each other and kicking up dust. Eddie wrinkles his nose, and his eyes skip over to the sandbox, where, to his shock, he sees someone looking back.

            The first thing Eddie notices is wild hair. It’s a loosely curly, reddish-brown mop, and so long that for a second Eddie thinks the kid is a girl. Then he sees knobby knees and too-big feet, like a baby horse, and dirty red sneakers that could only be a boy’s. The second he notices are the glasses – they’re so big they make the boy’s eyes look huge and glassy, blinking like owl’s eyes in the sun.

            The boy doesn’t smile or wave. He just _looks,_ for a lot more seconds than normal. Eddie feels all hot around the collar, decides he’s getting a sunburn, and hops quickly off the swings to go sit under the pine tree in the corner of the yard.

            He sits until the bell rings again, they line up to go back inside, and the boy keeps his eyes on Eddie until the yellow schoolbus huffs up to the curb.

            He goes home feeling weird, but when his mom asks how his day was, fussing over him, fixing him peanut butter crackers and asking if he needs to lie down, he only tells her carefully that it was good.

            The next day, Eddie can feel the boy’s eyes on him the second he walks in the room.

He sneaks a glance back. His hair is even crazier than yesterday, like it hasn’t been washed, and Eddie’s fairly sure he’s wearing the same shirt, too-big and too-floppy like laundry on the line. He’s wearing the same expression as yesterday, too: kind of like the way Stan looked at his paper while they did addition, nose crunched up trying to figure out a puzzle. But unlike Stan, this boy’s eyes are big and round and shiny.

            Eddie doesn’t want him to look anymore. He marches up to the big desk and tugs gently on the long skirt behind it.

            “Miss Davis?” He asks, and feels pleased when she not only hears him right away, but also kneels on the floor to listen better instead of the bent-at-the-waist thing adults usually do.

            “What is it, Eddie?” She says back, and he can feel his face rumple up in a frown. He smooths it out, sighing from his nose, and points across the room.

            “That boy keeps staring at me,” He complains. When Miss Davis looks over, Eddie sees the boy quickly turn his head away.

            “Hmm,” She says, “Do you know why?”

Eddie thinks it over, then shakes no.

            “I just – looked over yesterday, during outside time, and he was in the sandbox. Staring,” He adds, because her forehead is wrinkling slightly like she doesn’t understand. “And then he stared at me in numbers and he stared at me in reading, and he’s gonna do it again today.”

She just smiles a little more.

“You know what? I think he wants to be friends. Let’s go and say hi, okay?”

Eddie doesn’t think much of this plan, but before he can shake his head she is standing up again and taking his hand in her big adult one, and he lets her lead him across the room to where the other boy sits. He’s staring even more brazenly than before. A forgotten plastic triceratops hangs loosely in his grip.

            “Eddie, this is Richie,” Miss Davis says as they stop, “Richie, this is Eddie.”

Richie is quiet for a second, and his eyes have gotten even bigger, shimmering behind his glasses as he looks Eddie up and down.

            “Hi,” Eddie says finally, reluctantly, and suddenly the boy smiles, a too-big grin that changes his face – it’s full of wild, crooked teeth and warm sunshine.

            “Hi, I’m Richie, your name’s Eddie and you sit three seats down from me and I saw you coloring yesterday and it looked really neat and I didn’t know how you kept the crayons all in the lines and d’you have a bike or a dog?” He rushes all this out in one enormous breath, talking like his teeth get in the way of his mouth, and Eddie barely understands half of what comes out.

            Eddie glances around for Miss Davis, but she’s already disappeared back to the other side of the room. He tugs nervously at the front of his shirt.

            “Umm,” Is all he can get out, but it doesn’t matter much because Richie is talking again.

            “D’you know about the terra-dactyl or the tyrannasaurous rex? Here,” He says, without waiting for an answer, “you can hold my triceratops but don’t drop it, it’s part of my collection and I have a voice for her n’everything.”

            He shoves the toy into Eddie’s hands and Eddie shoves it right back, wrinkling his nose up at the grubbiness of the plastic. He looks at Richie’s fingernails, black with dirt.

            “I don’t want your triceratops. Do you ever wash your hands?”

“Washing hands is dumb,” Richie says, and now his smile is gone, “and why don’t you want my triceratops? It’s awesome.”

            _“You’re_ dumb, and I don’t wanna be friends with you, or – or your stupid triceratops! I just want you to stop staring at me all the time!” Eddie says, and he turns and marches to his desk, feeling kind of like he’s about to cry.

            He keeps his eyes on his paper the rest of the morning, but his chest feels tight – like how it gets right before he can’t breathe and needs to use his inhaler.

            He shoves away a traitorous thought that comes to him (something that sounds suspiciously like his mother’s voice, about how it might be nice to have a friend) and when they go outside, he heads straight for the pine tree, poking a stick around in the grass. When he looks up, there are two red sneakers in front of him, two knees covered in dirt and band-aids.

            “Hi,” Richie says, “what’s in your kangaroo pouch?”

“It’s a fanny pack.” Eddie says shortly. He wonders why Richie isn’t still mad from before, because he seems to be cheerful again; he’s smiling and looking at Eddie like he still wants an answer. “It has my inhaler in it, in case I need help breathing.”

            Richie tilts his head like an inquisitive puppy.

“Why d’you need help breathing?” He asks, puzzled, and Eddie pokes his stick harder into the dirt.

            “’Cause I have asthma in my lungs.” He explains, then unzips his fanny pack carefully and shows Richie the little white inhaler. “This part has medicine in it, and you squeeze this part to get it out.”

            “Cool,” Richie says after a moment, “You’re kinda like a robot!”

Eddie shrugs, confused, and then Richie grabs his wrist and gives him a pull, his grin back at blinding capacity.

            “Wanna come play in the sandbox?” He asks, and Eddie yanks his arm back.

“No! Why would I play in sand? That’s practically dirt!” He says, and Richie shrugs.

            “I think dirt’s pretty cool.”

Eddie shudders, imagining the grimy feel of dirt under his nails, the dryness of dust on his skin, and the relentlessness of his mother’s scrub brush.

            “My mom says dirt’s full of germs and bacteria,” Eddie says, watching Richie blink.

Richie puts his lower lip out thoughtfully.

“I don’t think dirt has germs in it, ‘cause dirt never makes me sick,” he says, and Eddie looks up.

            “But – that’s not what my mom says,” He tells Richie doubtfully. “She says if I play in dirt I’ll get really sick and have to go to the hop-sital and get _shots.”_

Richie shrugs again, and then sits down next to Eddie in the grass. He pokes at an ant with his finger.

            “D’you wanna play tag, then?” Richie asks, and Eddie dithers – his mom had told him not to play tag because he was _delicate_ and he could fall or be pushed or have an asthma attack running so hard like that, but if his mom was wrong about the dirt, then what if, just _what if_ she was wrong about tag too –

            The bell rings, and all the kids look up and start filing towards the door. Richie leaps to his feet, and Eddie expects him to dash away, but he waits while Eddie stands and brushes a piece of grass off his shorts.

            “I wish my desk was next to yours,” Richie whispers to him in line, and Eddie bites his lip. He’s _very_ glad he sits next to Stan – even from across the room he can see that Richie’s crayons are broken and peeled, his pencils chewed, his papers crumpled and exploding out of his backpack all over the floor. They go in and sit, and Richie keeps looking at him across the room, actually bending over his desk, and he doesn’t stop until Miss Davis says _please try and focus on your numbers, Richie_ three times.

            Eddie stares fixedly down at his addition – he still doesn’t like the staring.

The next day, Richie comes and sits next to him in the reading circle, wriggling on the rug. He gives Eddie one of his blinding smiles and leans forward excitedly.

            “Guess what I got?” Richie says by way of greeting, and Eddie sighs a little bit. His stomach is going all funny, and he doesn’t know if it’s because of Richie, but he’s suddenly worried he’s getting sick. Before he can answer, Richie is carefully unzipping his blue backpack, spilling papers and a ballpoint pen and a plastic action figure. He yanks out a comic book. It looks dirty and old.

            “What is that?” Eddie asks, fascinated by the drawings, reaching out to touch the paper. Then he sees a smear of black grime and quickly retracts his hand.

            “Batman!” Richie says proudly, smiling, “My Uncle Rob gave it to me, from out of his garage, and it has a guy in it called Joker who blows stuff up and Batman has a car with _wings_ –“

            “Alright class, let’s get started,” Miss Davis calls, and the babble of talk dies down. They sit through a story about a bird who leaves the nest to try and find his missing mother, and the whole time Richie pokes Eddie and whispers the words that Miss Davis is reading and rests his curly head on Eddie’s shoulder. When the book is done, Miss Davis closes it with a snap and smiles.

            “Now, we still have some addition to get through, so everyone take their seats, please,” she says, then raises her eyebrows when Richie’s hand shoots into the air. “Did you have a question, Richie?”

            “Can I move my desk next to Eddie’s?” Richie asks with his most charming grin. A storm of whispering sweeps the room. A few people giggle. Stan looks over at them, tilting his head a little bit. Eddie wishes he could sink through the floor and disappear.

Miss Davis’s eyebrows shoot almost up into her hair before she smiles again.

“If you did that, Richie, where would Stan and Lillian sit?” She asks gently, and Richie frowns.

            “Only one of them would have to move,” He explains carefully, with the air of someone who has thought a lot about a plan, “and Lilly can sit in my spot my the window. It’s really good for looking out of.”

            The girl who sits on Eddie’s left shakes her head and lisps through missing teeth.

“No, I _like_ sitting next to Eddie. He, he lets me use his red crayon.”

            Richie scowls, but before he can say anything else Miss Davis diplomatically interrupts.

            “Don’t worry, Lillian, nobody has to move. I’m sorry, Richie, but remember how we chose our seats last week? We can’t change now, because not everyone wants to.”

            Richie pouts, and Eddie breathes a sigh of relief.

A few hours later, after playground time that day, Eddie is the first one back at his desk. It’s a rambunctious day – kids are running around the room, scuffling, laughing, and trying to continue the game of tag from outside. Eddie turns around in his seat to watch, and when he faces front again, there’s a bedraggled yellow flower sitting on his desk, still attached to a clump of roots and dirt. He sees Richie across the room, scrubbing a green smudge onto the front of his shirt.

“Stan,” Eddie whispers, _“Stan.”_

Stan looks up and stares at the flower on Eddie’s desk for a second. His hand slows to a stop around its crayon, abandoning the bird it was drawing.

            “What?” He whispers back.

“Why d’you think Richie’s so, so _weird?”_ Eddie asks, and Stan rolls his eyes like the answer is obvious.

            “He’s only weird around you, Eddie,” Stan says. Eddie frowns.

“What? What d’you mean?”

            “He shows you all his stuff, he wants to move his desk, he always sits next to you in reading. He leaves flowers on your desk. _Mushy_ stuff.”

            Eddie is getting the funny feeling in his stomach again, but he opens his mouth anyway.

            “Why?” He persists, and Stan gives him a long, level look.

“’Cause he wants to marry you,” He says matter-of-factly. Eddie chokes.

            “Wh-? Bu – b – I can’t marry him! I’m _five!”_ Eddie says, incredulous. _Married_ is living in the same house, and sharing all your apple slices, and wearing rings. Through his horror, he registers that Stan is giggling. Eddie stares.

            “Nobody ever said you _had_ to marry him,” Stan says, adding another neat line to his bird’s curved wing. “And anyway, it’s not that bad.”

            “How do you know?” Eddie says fiercely, and Stan shrugs.

“I dunno. Sometimes my mom says ‘I shouldn’t’ve married you’ to dad, but then they always laugh and mom makes dad cook dinner. Then she’s happy the rest of the day.” And he gives Eddie a little head-shake. Eddie bites his lip and thinks that adults make zero sense. He goes home thinking hard, and continues to wonder right up until he goes to sleep that night.

            The next day, they are on the playground under a bright September sun and a soft blue sky. Eddie is alone on the swings when Richie comes up to him.

            Richie opens his mouth to say hello, but Eddie pokes the toe of his sneaker into the dirt and interrupts him before he can start.

            “Do you really want to marry me?”

Richie’s eyes get so wide they look like they might plop out onto the ground. He opens his mouth a few times, but each time he comes close to saying something it closes again. _Like a goldfish,_ Eddie thinks, and giggles at the thought.

            Richie seems to unfreeze.

“Only if _you_ wanna marry _me,”_ He says eagerly, and Eddie abruptly stops laughing.

            “Wh – no! Getting married is gross,” He says. “You have to wear rings, and, and _kiss!”_

Richie gives a strangled little cough.

“Uh, yeah. Totally gross,” He agrees, eyes still big and shiny, and Eddie relaxes. Richie hops up onto the swing next to him, frowning slightly.

            “Hey, how did you – um, who said I wanted to _marry_ you?”

“Stan,” Eddie replies, and Richie’s face turns red. Strangely, he doesn’t say anything.

            They swing in silence for a few minutes, but it seems like hours without Richie chattering. Eddie finally shoots a glance at him – he is staring fixedly at the ground.

            “I got a new lunchbox,” Eddie offers, and Richie looks up. His own lunchbox is the envy of the school, with Batman on it, and when he showed it to Eddie yesterday three other boys had gathered to touch the smooth tin.

            “Who’s on it?” Richie asks, and Eddie smiles.

“Wonder Woman,” He says, and Richie brightens.

            “Can I see?” He asks, and Eddie smiles a little wider, hopping off his swing.

“Sure,” He says simply, and Richie vaults off his swing, his hair flying.

            “Pip-pip, lead the way!” He says in a funny clipped voice, and Eddie laughs.

“What’s _that_ supposed to be?” He asks, and Richie sticks his tongue out.

            “British,” He says, then frowns, “Or _English,_ I dunno which.”

“You’re weird,” Eddie tells him, and Richie bows.

            They go inside to see Eddie’s lunchbox, Richie gives Eddie a cookie instead of stealing his apples, and Eddie watches Richie tackle Stan as they get on the schoolbus. Stan shouts, laughing as Richie whispers something and pounds angrily on Stan’s back. Eddie starts forward, worried, but then Richie smiles when Stan shoves him away, straightens his shirt, and ruffles his hair.

            Eddie catches Richie staring at him the next day, and this time, he smiles and waves.

**Author's Note:**

> also please leave a comment if you have thirty seconds cause it's guaranteed to make my day (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧


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